Ben,
Your comment that film photographers couldn't even dream of what can be done with digital cameras and stitching software today is simply uninformed. Apple's QTVR Authoring Studio was introduced in the mid 1990s when the best digital cameras produced a 640x480 image and cost around $1500. High-end digital SLRs and camera backs did not exist at that time. Scanning high-quality film images to produce the digital files needed to construct the panoramas was ordinary practice then and is still fairly common today.

While today's digital cameras make the work simpler and faster, I still find that shooting a 12 or 24 frame panorama on a Hasselblad and scanning the film on a film scanner produces a much larger image and, most importantly, a more beautiful image at a fraction of the cost of using the best digital SLR.

Secondly, it would benefit your readers to know that panoramic photography did not begin with the introduction of stitching software. Almost from the beginning of photography in the 1840s, photographers developed systems to produce both continuous and collaged panoramic images. This was not a new idea even then, but simply a further development of a tradition that existed in painting and drawing for thousands of years.